


When the West Wind Moves

by devovere



Category: Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Aftermath of Violence, Explicit Language, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Hurt/Comfort, Implied Sexual Content, Inspired by Poetry, Long Live Feedback Comment Project, Medical, Pre-Canon, Songfic (just a little bit), love without marriage, post-Season 1
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-17
Updated: 2018-10-17
Packaged: 2019-08-03 16:29:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16329554
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/devovere/pseuds/devovere
Summary: Exploring the relationship between Katrina Cornwell and “her” Gabriel Lorca, (long) before and shortly after the canon events of Season One.





	1. Stanza I. Singing in hard wind / Ceaselessly

**Author's Note:**

  * For [IceCream_Junkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCream_Junkie/gifts).



> Sincere thanks to Killermanatee, who beta-read this on a ferry during her vacation. Any errors, of course, are my own. 
> 
> Chapter titles are excerpted from the poem “Like Barley Bending” by Sara Teasdale. Song lyrics throughout, including the Chapter 2 epigraph, are from “Fields of Gold,” written by Gordon Sumner and Dusan Bogdanovic and recorded by Sting. See ending notes for more on both works. 
> 
> This fic is not meant to be consistent with book canon.

**Mid-2236.**

“Come on, drink up,” Katrina said, tossing back the last of the whiskey in her glass in a blithely fluid motion that spoke of places to go, one foot already on the ship that would take her away from Gabriel.

As if he didn’t have a ship to board himself. They were both leaving Earth again, the rank bands shiny on their new lieutenant commander uniforms.

But that didn’t change the fact that _she_ was leaving _him_.

He drank.

* * *

She spoke about her assignment and what would follow it.

“We’ll be the first crew tasked specifically and solely with the psychosocial health of the diplomatic corps. This has the potential to transform the corps itself.”

“That’s great, Kat,” he said. “The Federation will get more years of service out of its diplomats. Very cost-effective.”

She smacked his shoulder. “They’re people, not machines under warranty.”

He smirked at her. He loved to get that particular rise out of her, playing the cynic. She knew he didn’t mean it.

“I’m talking about the Federation finally living up to its potential, Gabe. Taking care of its own while expanding its influence sustainably, year after year. If this model lives up to expectations there are plans for a whole fleet. I could get my first command out of it.”

He smiled, watching her shine. “Too bad I’ll get mine first,” he teased her.

“You don’t really want that, do you? I bet you’d get off on me outranking you.” Her long fingers circled his wrist, where his rank bands would be, caressing.

“I get off,” he murmured, “On you kicking ass. Always have.” He reached for her.

She went. This was the easy part. Always had been.

* * *

A year later, he will blame it on the booze, and she will pretend to believe his excuse. They will smile knowingly together and roll their eyes at his impetuousness, his melodrama.

But that night, their last before parting yet again, he meant it, every word surging from the soles of his feet, from his gut roiling with desperate yearning.

“Say you’ll marry me, Kat. Wear my ring on the _Joliffe_.”

She looked up at him in mid-pour. Whiskey overflowed the tumbler, wetting her fingers, releasing her from shock.

“The fuck?” she laughed, bringing the bottle vertical again and setting it on the table with a _thunk_ much louder than necessary. She moved the glass toward her lips, spilling more liquor, and finally set it down as well. Her hand shook slightly.

He just looked at her, the table between them.

She stood abruptly and walked past him into the cabin’s kitchen. Water ran briefly and then went silent. When he turned in his chair and looked through the doorway, she was at the sink, a towel in her hands, gazing at him.

“You’re drunk,” she said definitively, and then laughed again, a beat too late. She walked back to the table and mopped up the spill.

He rose and caught the hand that still held the towel. “I’m not.”

“Gabe. Be serious.”

The way he looked at her did more to convince her than any drunken insistence could have done. It scared the shit out of her.

“We’ve been doing this for a decade, Kat. There’s no one else for me. Hasn’t been for a long time now.”

She was silent. Her heart was hammering in her chest: adrenaline, fear.

“You could have said something.” Her tone was accusing.

“Just did,” he retorted. Their tempers were rising. “What’s the problem? You got some other boyfriend you haven’t mentioned?”

“Since when do you have any right to ask that?”

“Friends ask that, Kat.”

“Doesn’t feel friendly all of a sudden. Feels jealous.”

He dropped her hand and pivoted away, stumbling. “Fuck. I’m not trying to tie you down. Just --“

“Just what?

“We turn thirty this year.” He wouldn’t meet her eyes.

“So? Is there some time limit on being friends with benefits that you never mentioned?”

“Married officers can seek co-assignment.”

“I’m not leaving my track. I’ve finally found what I really want to do in Starfleet.”

“You think I would ask you to? Really?” He sounded genuinely hurt. “But maybe your new program needs -- “

“--weapons specialists? We carry diplomats around the safer regions of space. It would be career suicide.”

She was correct, and they both knew it. But in his non-response, she sensed something stubborn and unyielding, some hard limit that she had never known he carried, and the revelation was a betrayal.

He read the shift in her face, from shock to suspicion, and started backpedaling. “Kat.”

She pulled away from him.

“Kat, don’t. Come on.”

That brusque tone, at least, was familiar. She let him draw close to her again, let his hand find her waist.

He nuzzled her ear. “I know. I’m an asshole. Don’t let it ruin our last night together.”

She shook her head, unsmiling, but she was stepping into his arms and he was letting her. She told herself he probably couldn’t even see her face at that moment. And he smelled the same, and held her the same as he always had, and she was more than a little tipsy herself.

He raised the volume on the music and started leading her in a gentle swaying dance, his hand firm on her lower back, her head on his shoulder. They weren’t looking at each other, but their bodies knew this dance. That night, that fight, was just another iteration, a variation on their theme: he pushed and then pulled her back, and she let him do it, for that familiar, easy reward at the end.

The music was a playlist from their Academy days. A old, old song began. It had been on the broadcast that night they watched the Perseids. The first time they’d known they were more than a hook-up, that there were feelings involved both ways. He couldn’t have timed it better.

He crooned along quietly, endearingly off-key, his cheek to the back of her head, his thick fingers tightening around her palm.

“ _You’ll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley…_ ”

He couldn’t have timed it worse. He wanted it—the lyrics, the dance, their old familiar pattern—to be a promise, but he knew it felt, even to him, more like a jealous threat. A claim on her that he had, in truth, no right to make.

He had to let her go.


	2. Stanza II. ...would I, unbroken, / Rise from pain

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Epigraph:  
> “ _I never made promises lightly and there have been some that I've broken_  
>  “ _But I swear in the days still left we'll walk in fields of gold._ ”

**Late 2257.**

Katrina had given Gabe up for dead three times.

Once, when the _Buran_ was destroyed. He’d been missing and -- in her heart, because of course he’d gone down with his ship -- presumed dead for eighteen hours. His shuttlecraft, almost by accident, had been found adrift, further than it should have been from the debris field.

Again, just months later, when the _Discovery_ had gone dark en route to Deep Space 5 with the key to uncloaking Klingon warships. His recent troubling conduct notwithstanding, she knew that Gabe would have died trying to get that intelligence to Starfleet. Having no evidence of his ship’s destruction this time only made his loss harder to bear.

And a third time, three months ago, when the _Discovery_ had been resurrected without him.

Now, of course, she understood they had been without him all along. Ever since the _Buran_. Deceived by his imposter, who had masked himself by reflecting what others wanted to see in him. _Mirror, mirror on the wall_ ….

Nobody could survive alone in the mirror universe. Not for that long. That’s what she told herself. Because otherwise, not knowing his fate might have killed her too in the end.

By then the Klingons had killed so many anyway. It was easier -- less psychologically taxing, if morally indefensible -- to just ... lump Gabriel in with all the other war dead.

She’d often found herself talking to him. A coping mechanism. “I’ve survived this long without you,” she would say to his memory, tallying the weeks, and then the months.

At first she had marked the time from the _Discovery_ ’s disappearance. Then it had returned with the truth about that other Lorca, and suddenly he’d been dead -- presumably, undoubtedly -- for close to two years, while another man had walked in his shoes wearing his face.

When Burnham had told her the truth about Lorca, Katrina’s first response had been rage. She had let that stranger in Gabe’s skin seduce her. She’d thought it was their old familiar pattern, a thread she could tug to bring him back from wherever the war’s trauma had taken him. She had excused his clumsy selfishness in bed as a symptom of whatever he wasn’t telling her about his recent captivity. The scars on his back had seemed to support that theory. Everyone had been changed by the war; everyone was being tested.

Now she understood that their encounter had been a test, and she had failed.

* * *

When the highly-classified news reached her that Gabriel Lorca had returned from the mirror universe, she was three days’ travel away from Deep Space Five. She spent the trip revisiting all the times and reasons she had given him up for dead. She couldn’t bring herself to believe that it was really him this time. She didn’t know what it would take to convince her.

She was terrified of being wrong again.

At the infirmary, she met with his doctors first. Malnourishment and evidence of torture, both physical and psychological. Cellular aging consistent with time elapsed since his disappearance, albeit with key markers accelerated, presumably, by severe stress. Cooperating with all testing and procedures -- that sure didn’t sound like Gabe, she thought, shields up.

She viewed the data, the holoimages. Different scars from his imposter’s, but that didn’t prove anything. His eyesight was normal for this universe, but that could have been done surgically as well.

She couldn’t tell. Bizarrely, she wished Georgiou could be located to verify this Lorca’s identity. Not that anyone could trust that bitch to be truthful. She considered staying away, letting the experts sort this one out. His psychologist requested a private meeting with her.

“He’s asking for you, Dr. Cornwell.”

Her gut clenched. She breathed through it. “What for?” she asked bluntly.

“He saw enough en route to realize how much worse the war got after he was taken. He’s afraid you’re dead and we’re not telling him the truth.”

“He said that?” That really didn’t sound like Gabriel.

“Not in so many words. My analysis.”

She didn’t tell her colleague that she was afraid of being fooled again. He could analyze her nonverbal communication for himself.

The thought that finally decided her mind for her was: “What if it were me?” A fundamental first step in empathy, and she was so far gone she had to come at it sideways. If she’d been taken, tortured, returned, suspected, and they’d called Gabe in? What would he have done?

She didn’t have to wonder. He wouldn’t have hesitated. He might have felt doubt, might have had misgivings. That wouldn’t have kept him from her bedside. Not for a minute.

This was the unspoken, unbroken promise between them. Always had been.

She went to him.

He lay curled on his side facing away from the observation window. As well as she knew his body, his frame was now so gaunt, so twisted by long confinement, that she wouldn’t have recognized it as Gabe’s. She took a deep breath, applied her professional command mask, and entered his room.

With some effort, he rolled onto his back to see his visitor. Another shock as his profile came into view. The wasting, the poorly-healed beatings had all but ruined his proud visage. She didn’t know this man.

Then their eyes met, and she did.

His mouth worked, and he blinked furiously. “Kat,” he said. And again, just: “Kat.”

* * *

They exchanged very few words that first day. Hands clasped, hair stroked, a brush of lips to cheek and forehead said all that was required, and his strength was soon exhausted.

Katrina went directly from the infirmary to her quarters and commed HQ to request extended leave. It was no request, and Admiral Terral knew it.

“Reason?”

“Caregiving responsibilities.”

He raised an eyebrow, the quintessentially Vulcan gesture asking questions his dignity would not permit.

“It’s him, Terral. He needs -- I need --.”

He waited.

“We keep our promises,” she finally said. He nodded slowly.


	3. Stanza III. Change my sorrow / Into song.

**Early 2258.**

The pain is worse at night, but he won’t let her medicate it. He says he’d rather hurt than dream.

All her training and she can’t stop his nightmares.

Can’t keep them at bay with physical comfort, either; he needs to rebuild crucial boundaries of self. She doesn’t know if he’ll ever be able to enjoy sensual touch again.

It’s not that she needs it herself, she reasons. But sex has always been their language. Inventing a new one between them just now is more than either can manage most days. So they fail to communicate a lot.

* * *

She brought him home six weeks ago, to the small house by the sea that has served as her private retreat for years now. She has rarely spent more than a week there herself. She sleeps on the couch, one ear open for Gabe, who moves unsteadily even with a walker for support.

The physical therapy he undergoes daily is excruciating to watch. She watches. She has to know how he is progressing, so she can support his strengths and remaining limitations at home.

The therapists speak of “activities of daily living.” She isn’t sure he is living again yet. Surviving, enduring -- yes.

His pride returns well before his core strength and balance. Near bedtime she finds him sprawled awkwardly on the bathroom floor. All he would have had to do was comm her in from her study. He’s bumped his head and grimaces fiercely when she rotates his shoulder joint, testing for new damage on top of the old.

She’s exasperated. He’s a bear, hostile and starved for a fight after months in hibernation, almost too stubborn and self-disgusted to help her as she lifts him to his feet.

“A goddamned admiral. You have things to do out there.” He pushes her arms away as he sinks painfully into a chair. “Your coddling is just making it worse!”

“It’s care, not coddling. You’ve just proven that you’re not safe in the house alone yet. We’re lucky your skull missed the edge of the tub or you’d be having your cranium drilled right now.”

“Not your mess to clean up. They can send in orderlies to cart me back and forth.”

She all but snarls, “Not on my watch, Lorca.”

He wrests the antiseptic cloth from her and cleans his own abrasions. For the one on his hip, he has to twist so far he can’t help groaning. She hurls the medkit against the wall.

Silence descends, and then a shuddering sigh escapes him. She turns to find him bent over in his seat, head in his hands.

It’s the first time she’s been pulled back to him by his own despair. Something breaks inside her.

She kneels before him, covering his hands on his face with her own. Leans in to kiss his forehead, just to the left of the swelling bruise. He lets her, so she keeps her lips there for a long, long moment.

He still won’t meet her eyes.

Finally she tugs his hands away from his face. “Gabriel.”

He presses his lips together, swallowing unshed tears.

" _Gabriel._ Stop trying to carry the weight of the whole universe on your shoulders. You don't have to do this alone."

He slowly lifts his face. The pain on it is total. They have reached a moment of truth-telling, a vulnerability he never could have shown her before.

“Which universe, Kat?” His voice is hoarse and flat. “Which one?”

“I don’t know. Any of them. Not while I’m with you.”

He clutches her hand with one of his, reaches halfway toward her hair with the other. “You are.” His face spasms. “You were.”

“I will be.”

“I know.”

* * *

She tries to put him to bed, but the helpless, shamed look in his eyes says he cannot face the demons of his dreamscapes just yet. He accepts instead her couch, lying down still clothed, lights and radio his protection from sleep. Neither releases the other’s hand. She sits on the floor and leans back, their hands clasped across her chest. Peace descends like a blanket. Her eyes close.

_"Will you stay with me? Will you be my love upon the fields of barley?"_

Their song on the radio, and he turns it up, rolling onto his side.

Katrina rouses from her doze at his shoulder to his fingers in her hair. He begins to croon, a raspy whisper. His lips brush her ear.

“ _Many years have passed since those summer days…_ ”

She finishes the line.

“ _... among the fields of barley._ ”

They sing together the next words.

“ _See the children run, as the sun goes down…_ ”

His voice chokes with tears first, and then hers, and then they are forehead to forehead, wiping one another’s tears away, and he is dragging her from the floor to lie half atop him.

Forgiveness flows between them in broken apologies, mutterings of “Stop, it’s okay” and “I know, you don’t have to --.” His nose is buried in her hair and his good arm presses her against his torso. Her fingers move lightly over his skull, his neck and collarbone. He shivers and arches against her, old signs of a familiar pleasure surfacing.

She feels gratitude, hope returning, prayers she would never utter somehow answered regardless.

She pulls away to lie next to him, still slowly touching him, only above the waist, avoiding his newer bruises. He falls asleep as she watches his face.

 

* * *

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> [IceCream_Junkie](https://archiveofourown.org/users/IceCream_Junkie/profile) asked for this pairing to the prompt "Stop trying to carry the weight of the whole universe on your shoulders. You don't have to do this alone." 
> 
> She further challenged me to somehow use as inspiration:
>
>> "As Barley Bends."
>> 
>> Like barley bending  
> In low fields by the sea,  
> Singing in hard wind  
> Ceaselessly; 
>> 
>> Like barley bending  
> And rising again,  
> So would I, unbroken,  
> Rise from pain;
>> 
>> So would I softly,  
> Day long, night long,  
> Change my sorrow  
> Into song.
>> 
>> Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)  
> 
> 
> The poem gave me the three-stanza structure and also evoked for me Sting's "Fields of Gold," which I use more overtly as a thematic carry-through for the Cornwell/Lorca relationship over time and trauma. It's an anachronism that requires a big suspension of disbelief, but in my defense I don't know what music kids at the Academy will be listening to ca. 2226. Plus it is just a lovely ballad, and it's IceCream_Junkie's fault for mentioning barley.
> 
> * * *
> 
> This story is part of the [LLF Comment Project](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/llfcommentproject), which was created to improve communication between readers and authors. I invite and appreciate feedback, including:
> 
>   * Short comments
>   * Long comments
>   * Questions
>   * Constructive criticism
>   * <3 as extra kudos
>   * Reader-reader interaction
> 

> 
> [LLF Comment Builder](https://longlivefeedback.tumblr.com/post/170952243543/now-presenting-the-llf-comment-builder-beta) may be a useful resource for some. 
> 
> I reply to comments. That means you can expect me to reply to your comment, eventually and barring unforeseen circumstances. (Once in a while I miss or don't receive a notification, for example.) 
> 
> If you _don’t_ want a reply, for any reason, feel free to sign your comment with “whisper.” I will appreciate it but not respond.


End file.
